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General Atlantic has tapped tennis legend Novak Djokovic to serve as a global strategic advisor.

My 14 year old daughter got hacked by someone who was able to add themselves as a "linked parent" to her account. I'm not even sure that this person got ahold of her password in the first place. All this happened on Wednesday morning (6/24/26) but on the day it happened I did not recieve a single email about any of this even though the account is tied to my email address (verified). Usually if there is a new log in on an unrecognized device I would have gotten an email about it, but nothing was

Prime Day isn’t just about cheap TVs. It’s also about cheap stuff to watch on your cheap TV.

FCC refuses to provide messages, has "wasted a year" of court's time, filing says.

The asteroid will be visible for several nights from different parts of the world. We’ll tell you when and where to look, and what equipment you’ll need to spot it.

Everyone is selling AI to small businesses right now. Most of it is hype. But some of it is genuinely useful — and knowing the difference can save you thousands in wasted tooling. I run a small agency in Stuttgart that builds websites and automations for local service businesses: coaches, doctors, beauty studios, consultants. Here's what actually moves the needle for them in 2025. What "AI Automation" Actually Means for Small Businesses Forget the generic pitch. For a local service business, AI automation is useful in exactly three places: Client communication at scale — responding to inquiries 24/7 without hiring a receptionist Reducing admin time — intake forms, follow-ups, reminders, invoicing triggers Content creation — but only as a speed boost, not a replacement for your voice Anything beyond that is usually overkill for a business under 10 employees. The One Automation Every Service Business Should Have Automated follow-up after initial contact. Here's the typical flow without automation: Client fills out contact form You see it 4 hours later You write a reply If you're busy, it takes a day Client has already booked elsewhere With automation: Client fills out form Immediate confirmation email ("Got your message, here's how to book a slot") Link to booking calendar You're notified. If they don't book in 48h, a follow-up email goes out automatically This alone converts 20-40% more inquiries into booked clients. No AI model needed — just a simple workflow in n8n, Make, or Zapier. Where LLMs Actually Help Language models (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) are genuinely useful for small businesses in these areas: Intake Forms → Personalized Responses A coaching client fills out a detailed intake form. Normally, you'd spend 20 minutes reading it and writing a personalized welcome email. With a simple LLM integration: Intake form submitted Webhook fires to n8n LLM reads the form, generates a personalized summary + welcome You review it in 30 seconds and hit send Same personal

Anthropic's engineers ship eight times more code than they did a few years ago. And they had to start scheduling lunches so people would talk to each other. Fiona Fung, who leads the Claude Code team, said it on Lenny's Podcast last week. Working with agents all day had started to feel isolating. The team was fast, but they'd stopped running into each other. So they added pairwise programming lunches and hackathons — rituals to put back the thing that used to happen on its own. Eight times the output. Scheduled conversation. That ratio is worth sitting with. Whatever goes missing here doesn't show up in the metrics. It doesn't throw an error. It just quietly stops being available. Here's the part that bugs me most. Ask an AI whether your approach is sound and it mostly tells you it is. Not because it's lying — because it's answering the prompt. No stake in the outcome, no history with the system, no memory of the last three times this exact idea was tried and quietly failed. A colleague pushing back is a different thing. They've got context you never typed into the window, because they were there when it was earned. They're going to maintain this too. They might be wrong — but wrong in a direction you hadn't thought of. An agent can't disagree with you like that. It agrees faster. Same with scope. The agent builds what you ask for, all of it, thoroughly. It won't mention that the third feature is the one nobody will use, or that "good enough" happened two iterations ago, or that something next door already solves most of this. Knowing when to stop comes from someone who's watched a codebase rot under a hundred individually-reasonable decisions. And it only knows what you put in front of it. The person who worked on payments remembers the edge case you're about to recreate. The junior who joined three months ago still sees the thing everyone stopped noticing. That gap — between what's in the window and what isn't — is where the expensive mistakes live. Then the part

Hello, I'm Shrijith Venkatramana. I'm building git-lrc, an AI code reviewer that runs on every commit. Star Us to help devs discover the project. Do give it a try and share your feedback for improving the product. An AI model writes a paragraph. It sounds fluent. It looks convincing. But how do you know whether it's actually good? This deceptively simple question has occupied researchers for more than two decades. Long before ChatGPT, machine translation researchers faced exactly the same problem. Human evaluation was expensive, inconsistent, and painfully slow. If every new model required thousands of humans to compare translations, research would crawl. That necessity gave rise to BLEU , one of the most influential evaluation metrics in AI history. Years later, as language models became better at paraphrasing and reasoning, BLEU started to show its age. Researchers responded with learned metrics like BLEURT and COMET , which use neural networks to judge language much more like humans do. Interestingly, this mirrors software engineering itself. We first wrote simple unit tests, then integration tests, and today we increasingly rely on sophisticated observability systems. Evaluation metrics for LLMs have undergone a similar evolution. Let's see why. Before BLEU: The Evaluation Bottleneck Imagine you're building Google Translate in 2001. Every time your team improves the model, someone has to read thousands of translated sentences and score them. Suppose a single sentence pair takes only 20 seconds to judge. Evaluating 50,000 sentences would require nearly 280 human-hours . Now imagine dozens of experiments every week. Evaluation—not training—quickly becomes the bottleneck. Researchers at IBM, led by Kishore Papineni , introduced BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) in 2002 to automate this process. Their idea was surprisingly simple: If a machine translation resembles what professional translators write, it's probably good. This became one of the most cited papers

I noticed something a few months ago. I was talking less to my colleagues. Not because anything was wrong. I had a question, I described it to an AI, I got something useful back. Why loop in a human if the loop is already closed? It took a while to name what was actually happening. There's a version of the AI story where the interesting work disappears. The agent implements. The spec session produces the plan. Humans review the output. What's left? Ticket hygiene and rubber stamping. Engineering as a series of approvals. I think that's wrong. But I understand why it feels true. Here's what I think is actually happening instead. The agent produces the increment. But the agent doesn't decide what the increment should move toward. It doesn't know whether this library is the right bet for the next three years. It doesn't know which of two implementation approaches leaves options open and which quietly closes them. It doesn't know whether the architectural call made today creates a problem nobody will notice until the system is under load eighteen months from now. That work — giving the project direction, validating trade-offs, deciding what the system becomes — isn't specable. You can't write a ticket for it. And it's not going away. The craft didn't disappear. It moved. Direction is the word I keep coming back to. The agent executes well. It implements against a spec. It generates options when you ask for them. But it doesn't carry a point of view about where the system should go. It doesn't have a stake in the decision. It will implement the wrong architectural direction just as confidently as the right one, if that's what the spec says. Someone has to hold the direction. Someone has to know enough about the codebase's history, the team's constraints, and the product's trajectory to say: not that library, we've been down that road. Not that pattern, it doesn't survive the load we're heading toward. This approach now, that refactor later, in this order, for these reaso

"A fool with a tool is still a fool." — often attributed to Grady Booch I keep coming back to this quote when I watch teams adopt AI. In my last post ( https://schrottner.at/2026/06/18/The-Wrong-End-of-the-Problem.html ) I wrote about shifting the engineering process left — spec sessions, autonomous agents, humans reviewing output rather than writing it. A few people asked the obvious follow-up: if an agent implements and an AI reviews, why do I need a team at all? It's a fair question. And I think the answer is in that quote. The agent validates against your prompt. That's it. If your thinking is muddled, the output will be muddled — just faster and at greater cost. An agent doesn't tell you that you're solving the wrong problem. It solves whatever problem you gave it, thoroughly and without complaint. Most AI usage right now treats AI as a tool. Which means the quality of the output is bounded by the quality of the thinking that went into the prompt. A fool with a tool is still a fool. The tool just makes the foolishness more expensive. The team is the check on intent. Not after the agent has burned three sprints on the wrong thing — before it starts. That's what mob planning actually is, when you think about it. Not a meeting. Not process overhead. It's the place where bad ideas get caught before they get expensive. Where someone asks "wait, why are we building this" before an agent runs with it for a week. But there's something else happening in that room that I think gets underestimated. It's where the learning happens. Not just prompting. System thinking. Architectural patterns. How to decompose a problem. Why a certain approach fits this codebase and another doesn't. How a senior frames a problem before an agent ever touches it — the mental model that makes the output actually good. Right now that knowledge isn't transferring. Everyone is heads-down with their own tools, developing their own habits in isolation. Engineer A gets dramatically better output than

“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” says OpenAI. “It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”